Day

Strasbourg - Colmar / La Sciere

 

Although we would have breakfast at 8:30am only, we woke up early anyway.  I was outside on the deck area at 7am and found the beautiful sun was rising.  The La Dame Blanche is so beautiful, it situates in a very small village (only 5 families and total 22 people) over-looking an infinite lawn.  I wish I would someday have a house like this (probably would only happen in my dream :p).

 

We had a busy schedule today. We would further drive east to a historic city Strasbourg (126km) andthen turned south down to Colmar.  After Colmar we would bewestbound again going back Paris direction.

 

Strasbourg, very close to the border to Germany, is the capital and principal city of the Alsace région in northeastern France and have been annexed several times by France and Germany in the past 200 years.  The whole of Strasbourg town centre, the "Grande Ile" has been listed as World Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO.  It is very rare for an entire town centre to receive this distinction, and in 1988 Strasbourg was the first site in France to receive such an honour.  This photo on the right is the Cathedral seen through Rue Mercière, which is one of thenotable medieval streets in Strasbourg.

The Kammerzell House(on the left) is one of the most famous buildings of Strasbourg and one of the most ornate and well preserved medieval civil housing buildings in late Gothic architecture in the areas formerly belonging to the Holy Roman Empire.  Built in 1427 but twice transformed in 1467 and 1589, the building as it is now historically belongs to the German Renaissance but is stylistically still attached to the Rhineland black and white timber-framed style of civil (as opposed to administrative, clerical or noble) architecture.  The building's inside has been decorated on all floors by lavish frescoes by Alsatian painter Léo Schnug (1878-1933). It now houses a restaurant.

 

It's 12:30noon, should get something to eat.  We all love sausages so we stopped at this shop selling pretzels and hotdogs.  We ordered 2 long dogs and shared.. the cheesy one was good but not the other which was stuffed with choucroute.

We walked around for another hourthen headed down north to Colmar(75km).  It was 3pm when we got in there.  Found the Statue of Liberty at the town's entrance.  Turned out the creator & sculptor, Auguste Bartholdi (1834-1904), of the statue now standing in NYC was born in Colmar.

 

The whole city of Colmar was decorated with X'mas ornaments and X'mas trees.  Very romantic!

 

 

We left Colmar at around 3:45pm for our chambre for the night, La Sciere (115km), which from the map situates on a mountain.  It was completely dark by 5pm and we were almost there but were still climbing mountains with no lighting on the roads.  To add more salt to it, it was raining and foggy.  Alan was swearing and sighing until our GPS told us that we were arriving at destination!

 

La Sciere is a lovely mountain cottage.  It smelt of wood and stone.  Our host Corinne took us to our chambres and told us to go down to her kitchen to have dinner at 7pm.  There we went sitting around Corinne's dining table at her cozy kitchen with her husband.  She made a traditional French dish which pleasedthe men very much.  It was sausages and lentils. Regardless of the simplicity of it, it was very tasty. Our dessert was apple tart, equally delicious. Drank 1 bottle of white and 2 reds with the couple. Kevin became very talkative, as he usually is after a few drinks.  We laughed the night away and found ourselves in beds by 10:30pm.  We decided we should start the next day earlier so we said we would have breakfast at 8am instead.  Bonne nuit!